


"That's the easy part."

by AuthorinExile



Series: Fictober 2020 [2]
Category: Borderland Series - Terri Windling, Danceland - Emma Bull and Will Shetterly
Genre: Addiction recovery, Best Friends, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Drug Withdrawal, Expanding on Orient's Past as a Wharf Rat, Expanding on Tick-Tick's Role in his Recovery, First Meetings, Gen, Meet-Cute, Minor suicidal ideation, Platonic Cuddling, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Queer Themes, Queerplatonic Relationships, References to Danceland, References to Depression, Wharf Rats - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29252898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuthorinExile/pseuds/AuthorinExile
Summary: Orient meets Tick-Tick on accident. He'll never stop being grateful for that.
Relationships: Orient & Tick-Tick
Series: Fictober 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2147928
Comments: 1





	"That's the easy part."

**Author's Note:**

> Young Me, absolutely obsessed with Orient and Tick-Tick's dynamic as Best Friends Who Are Always There For Each Other: I just think they're neat!
> 
> Older Me, grayro-ace and in love with QPRs: Oh.

Orient thinks Tick-Tick is a queen when he first sees her walking into the bar.

He doesn’t say so--will never say so, in fact--but there’s just something about the way she walks that doesn’t seem as mundane as the rest of them.

Now, Orient’s a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them, so he knows the real reason. It’s that elfblood--the _Trueblood_ , he thinks with a sneer as a group of elves all in Blood red leather scowl at his table of humans and halfies--that gives her such grace, such poise, such…

He’s halfway through forming the word “elegance” in his mind when she snorts at something one of her companions has said. And he really does mean _snort_. She starts to laugh, but the air only goes in so far before redirecting itself, and suddenly all six and a half feet of her is leaning heavily on the counter and laughing in such an unrestrained way that he sits there, slack-jawed, as he comes to a very important realization.

It’s not the elfblood that gives her that gait and stance and smile. It’s all 100% genuine Ticker. She just doesn’t _care_ , doesn’t give a single solitary damn what other people think. Half of B-town tries to give off that vibe, tries to pretend they're so high above it all and nothing can touch them, and it's the simple fact that they _try_ that ruins the effect. This one, though... For her, it's just how it is.

With a smile, Orient stands and makes his way to the bar where she sits, alone now except for her beer, and remembers at the last second not to stick his hand out for a shake. Most elves don’t like that.

“Hey there,” he says, trying his best not to sound flirty or creepy and not sure he’s pulling it off. “I’m Orient. You are?”

The Elf Whose Name He Doesn’t Yet Know tilts her head and, with an obvious look over his person, says, “Not interested,” before turning back around.

“Ouch, but fair,” Orient replies, running his hand over his hair self-consciously. He hadn’t exactly dressed in his Sunday best to go to a dive bar with a bunch of Rats, but in his defense, he hadn’t thought he’d be trying to impress anyone.

Orient is stubborn, so he takes the empty barstool next to her and orders a beer of his own.

“Anyway,” he says, “I’m not offering anything. Well, nothing like that, at least. I do some work, of course.”

When the elf quirks a brow, Orient chokes on his drink and barely manages to splutter out, “N-Not like th-that,” as she laughs.

As he regains his breath, she says, “Well, what kind of work, then?”

“I can Find things.”

Apparently able to hear the capital letter he puts on the word, she raises both her eyebrows this time and looks him over.

“You’re fey?”

Orient shrugs.

“I’ve heard it called that, yeah. Either way, you ever need something Found, I’m your man.”

She squints at him, trying to puzzle him out, before slowly nodding.

“I’m Tick-Tick,” she tells him at long last, and Orient doesn’t even try to fight the wide smile that overtakes his features.

His grin grows when she says, “I need things Found, on occasion. Maybe I’ll take you up on that some time.”

“Well then, Tick-Tick,” he says, clinking the neck of his bottle against hers, “I think this is the start of a beautiful acquaintanceship.” 

She doesn’t smile, but the corner of her mouth hitches up ever so slightly, and Orient considers it a win.

He doesn’t hear from her for a couple weeks after that, but that’s no surprise. He semi-drunkenly approached a stranger in a bar. What was he expecting, a house visit?

_Not that I have much of a house_ , he thinks, stepping over one of the many unconscious Wharf Rats currently sharing his sleeping quarters.

He’s thirsty, as he always is these days, but the River Water isn’t really doing its job anymore, so he takes off for that special section of SoHo close enough to the Wharf to allow Rats to be regulars and far enough into SoHo proper to be neutral territory in earnest. He intends to get a drink of some kind and maybe one of those ominous-looking fish tacos that are so common around here. Not exactly what he would’ve considered breakfast back in the World, but this isn’t the World, and it’s almost noon anyway.

He does not intend, even a little, to almost literally trip over Tick-Tick where she leans against a heavily graffitied brick wall.

“Oh,” she says, gentle surprise coloring the word, “there you are.”

Orient almost snorts, but he’s got the beginnings of a hangover--or, at least, the River Water equivalent--building behind his eyes, so he refrains.

“Looking for me, were you?”

Tick-Tick doesn’t blush. The elves have more self-control than that.

Instead, she blinks and glances briefly to the right before refocusing on him. Orient immediately knows the answer to his question and smiles slightly.

“Well, I... I recently lost something.”

“Oh, yeah? Lost in the ‘I left it in my boyfriend’s closet’ variety or in the ‘I owed somebody money’ variety?”

Tick-Tick tilts her head and considers the question more seriously than he’d expected for a moment.

“Lost,” she finally decides, “in the ‘the girl I’ve been hooking up with owed somebody money and is now hiding from me’ variety.”

_Oh,_ Orient thinks.

“Oh,” Orient says.

“Well,” he adds after a moment, “I charge upfront, and it might take a while. I can’t just tell you where it is. I have to follow the trail. You understand?”

After a moment, Tick-Tick nods.

“Do you have to walk, or can we take my bike?”

Orient shrugs.

“Bike’s probably fine, but we might end up having to do some of it on foot.”

Tick-Tick shrugs fluidly and leads him around the corner to reveal an absolutely _gorgeous_ bike, complete with shiny paint job and, somewhat bafflingly, a sidecar.

“A sidecar?” Orient finds himself asking, even though he’d rather know where she got that bike and how much did it cost and would she let him drive it, just once, if he gave her all his Not-so-Worldly possessions in trade?

“Yes,” Tick-Tick says, not in the least embarrassed by what is, for B-town, a very strange addition to an otherwise flawless machine. “I spent weeks working on it, trying to figure out what was missing. Turns out, the rest of the bike was just lonely.”

_You built this thing???_ He wants to shout.

“Lonely?” He mutters instead.

“Yes,” Tick-Tick says, blinking like _he’s_ the strange one before abruptly remembering that she is. She shrugs a bit helplessly.

“Well, uh,” Orient says as he climbs into the sidecar, “must ferry lots of people around, then.”

“Not at all,” she responds, starting the magic box with a gesture that brings the bike roaring to life. “I haven’t found the person the sidecar’s for, yet.”

She punctuates that sentence with a brief, apparently involuntary, glance in his direction as he settles. He pretends not to notice, and she pretends not to notice him noticing, and then she says, “Orient, where is my new chain breaker?”

Orient points in the direction the Pull is coming from, and Tick-Tick grins as her bike screams down the street.

That day, she pays by buying his lunch. The next time, she pays with an hour’s worth of drinks, and the time after that, she hands him a silver bracelet obviously from over the Border.

At some point, she stops ditching him as soon as the job’s done and paid for. They start getting drinks after, and then meals, and then they go to clubs and bars and parties together after every Finding. 

And then they just...drop the pretense. Tick-Tick still needs him to Find things on occasion, but they hang out outside of that. They hang out in public and at her apartment and to get food and to get drunk and just to talk on Tick-Tick’s rooftop as they stare at a canopy of stars.

And it’s just... _so_ nice.

One of Orient’s roommates sees them in public one day and screams, “The Finder gettin’ that elven puuuuussyyyyy,” as soon as Orient walks into the apartment he shares with a metric fuckton of other Rats, which makes him cringe.

Denying it would be pouring gasoline on the fire, so Orient rolls his eyes and shouts back, “Jealousy ain’t a good look on you, Tatter,” which makes them laugh.

It isn’t true, though. Orient doesn’t even want it to be true. What he has with Tick-Tick is purely platonic, and so is the growing affection between them, and that’s just so good. It is, really. If there was one thing Orient had picked up since getting to Bordertown, it was that everybody wants something. Maybe money, maybe shelter, maybe plain old sex--every relationship in this town is built more on mutual benefit than on affection. Every relationship he has had since coming here--platonic or romantic, sexual or not--had its foundation in what he and the other person could do for one another.

Until Tick-Tick.

Tick-Tick is Orient’s best friend, but saying so feels like doing her a disservice because she’s so much more than that, too. She’s the best friend he’s ever had. She’s the closest person in his life, maybe ever, and he loves her to the moon and back, and it is entirely and wholly platonic.

He’s not sure he’s ever heard of a relationship like that, but he’s very glad he found one.

There’s just one problem.

“Am I your Other Woman?”

Tick-Tick asks the question with a teasing tone and a playful smile and tight eyes.

“What,” Orient says as his omelet slides off his fork and back onto his plate with a wet slap.

“Well,” Tick-Tick says, now amused, “I’ve never seen where you live, and you don’t talk about a significant other. Or an insignificant other, for that matter. And you spend all of your precious time--”

“Not _all_ of it.”

“--carousing about town with little ol’ me. I suppose I was just wondering…”

She stops there, but Orient’s mind keeps going, whirling with the revelation that as much as she’s opened up to him, he...hasn’t really returned the favor.

“No,” he eventually says. “No, you’re not the Other Woman in my life. It’s not… I’m not hiding or anything. At least, not on purpose. I just… I-I have shitty roommates and live in a shitty part of town, and my living situation is…”

“Shitty?”

Orient gives a sheepish nod. 

“Yeah.”

“Well… As long as there’s not another woman in your life. I can be quite possessive, you know,” she says with a haughty and entirely fake sniff.

“Just you,” he says with feeling, returning her smile when it finally reaches her eyes. 

It shouldn’t be surprising when the Thirst finally creeps up on him, but somehow, it is.

It starts slow enough that he barely notices. He’s extra thirsty, so he drinks a little more. Then he’s extra Thirsty, so he drinks as much red water as he can get his hands on. It gets to the point that he’s carrying around a jug of the Big Bloody’s Finest and still feels like he’s dying.

It gets to the point that he stops leaving the shitty warehouse he lives in, foregoing even his regular lunches with Tick-Tick despite desperately not wanting to give up any part of her.

It gets to the point that the other Wharf Rats pick him up and drag him to the edge of the river and leave him there just as they’ve done with hundreds of other Rats when the Thirst becomes too much.

And for ages, Orient just sits there. He drinks and he cries and then he drinks again to fight off the imaginary dehydration and he’s _dying._

The Mad River, with its addictive and poisonous nature, is killing him as surely as any bullet would more slowly and more painfully than any bullet could hope.

And Orient… Orient doesn’t want to fight anymore. He’s tired. He’s tired of hurting and of crying and of being a Wharf Rat and of slowly killing himself and of letting everyone around him down. He’s tired of lying to Tick-Tick about where he lives and what he does. He’s _so_ tired. He wants to stop being tired. He wants to stop fighting.

So he does.

He just sort of gives up and dissociates for a while and only wakes up when a very familiar elvish voice gasps and says his name. Very familiar elvish hands check his pulse and touch his face and pick him up even though he has _begged_ her not to do that, _honestly_ , the height difference is embarrassing enough.

He tries to protest, tries to lovingly mock her elvish strength, tries to smile the way she calls “rakish” and tell her he loves her.

Instead, he sobs, “ _Ticker_ ,” into her shoulder, and she says, “Oh, love, what have you done now?” and carries him into her apartment.

The next several days--several weeks, maybe--will exist as nothing but a blur in Orient’s mind for the rest of his days.

Gentle hands push his face into alternating hot and freezing water. Strong arms hold him up as he vomits, expelling everything in him. The wobble of a familiar voice as it shouts for him to _keep walking, damn you_ to prevent him from just lying down and dying in a corner. Hair the color of dandelion fluff falls into his face as someone holds him so gently, like something precious, while tremors wrack his body and that familiar voice sings to him in soft Elvish.

He comes mostly to his senses at one point to see Tick-Tick kneeling over him, weeping with all the power in her frame.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers, voice cracked and slurring.

Tick-Tick’s face shoots up, and though she abruptly stops crying, her face remains blotchy and tear-streaked in a way that drives home just how pale elves are.

“You’re… But I thought…”

She doesn’t even bother finishing the sentence, springing into action to check his temperature and help him drink blissfully clear water. Orient’s surprised when he doesn’t choke on it for the first time in who knows how long. Instead, it soothes the ache in his throat and cools him comfortably, and he sighs a whispered thanks to Tick-Tick before he falls not into unconsciousness but genuine, deep sleep.

Later, when he’s regained most of his clarity and some of his strength and all of his ability to remember anything going on around him, he’s still lying in Tick-Tick’s bed. He supposes he’s been sleeping there for a while now, and while he starts to wonder where she slept in all that time, all it takes is a brief glance to where she rests beside him--to her pale, tear-streaked face and darkened eye sockets--to assure him that she _didn’t._ She didn’t sleep while he was recovering.

He’s sure he wouldn’t have either, had the roles been reversed.

He doesn’t realize he’s asking until he hears the croak of his unused voice.

“Why?”

The one of her shining silver eyes not pressed into the pillow peeks open to catch his as she mumbles, “What?”

“Why’d you...do it?”

Tick-Tick shifts to fully face him, briefly squeezing the arm wrapped around his middle. Whether it’s for his comfort or her own, he can’t say. Both, he imagines.

“Why’d I stop you from overdosing on Mad River water, you mean?”

At his nod, she adds, “Why didn’t you ever tell me the truth?”

Orient winces, but he doesn’t have an answer. Not one that’s fair. Not one that she would like. She shifts during his silence, and Orient expects her to pull away. Instead, she tightens her grasp and curls more securely around him, tucking her face into his neck and sighing quietly.

“Well,” she says, so quietly he wouldn’t hear if she weren’t pressed against his ear, “I only just figured out who the sidecar’s for, you know. The bike would be lonely if I’d let you die.”

Orient laughs loudly and fully and genuinely.

If his cheeks are wet and his laughs shaky and Tick-Tick’s wobbling smile matches his own exactly, well, that’s no one’s business but their own.

“So what now? Do I just...move on? Twelve-step plan and rehab and pray it away?”

“Hmm,” Tick-Tick mumbles into his shoulder, content to hold him as long as he’ll allow. “Of course not. Right now, you just try to live.”

Orient replies sarcastically, “Oh, is that all?”

“Of course. After all, I’ve done all the hard work. Living? That’s the easy part.”

  
  


Orient does end up living, to his own surprise.

He lives and he swears off every drug known and he replaces River Water with coffee, which is a more expensive habit but an infinitely safer one.

Tick-Tick introduces him to her friends, and he makes some friends of his own. Then he blinks, and the two of them have assembled a motley crew of beautiful idiots and delightful ragamuffins and one (1) werewolf poet.

They get a reputation, the two of them. The Fixer and the Finder, folks say, practically joined at the hip. Need one? Find the other. Hurt one? Pray their other friends get to you first.

But not everyone heeds the warnings, and not everyone recognizes them on sight, and Shit Happens, and Orient sees Tick-Tick cry for only the second time in as long as he’s known her.

Later, after it all, Orient is sitting in his bed with a couple of sprains and a couple of breaks and a concussion and gods know what else. Tick-Tick is, as always, right beside him. Naturally, she refused to leave his bedside, sending Wolfboy and Caramel to do the dirty work instead. As far as she was concerned, her personal dirty work ended when she destroyed Glasses’ ribcage with a well-aimed shotgun. Orient was her priority, now.

Tick-Tick reaches out to move Orient’s shaggy hair out of his face. The red tips have begun to fade. She’ll have to redo them.

If he wants. If he can even stomach the sight of red for a while after this.

“Oh, Orient,” she sighs. “Whatever will I do with you?”

“Feed me, I hope,” he says with that rakish grin she hates to admit she adores. “Hold me, on occasion. I’m a simple man.”

“Are you,” she monotones, unimpressed.

Suddenly serious, Orient says, “We fix all this. Get Strider free. Get that awful bitch out of B-town. Get Sunny off our backs.”

Exasperated, Tick-Tick says, “Oh, is that all?”

She doesn’t even realize her mistake until Orient grins and replies, “‘Course. I’ve already done all the hard work. That’s the easy shit.”

“I hate you,” she swears.

“No, you don’t,” he replies.

And Tick-Tick leans forward to wrap her arms around Orient because he’s right.


End file.
